Silk Road battleground: individualism v authority

The FBI raided the Silk Road and arrested its alleged owner on October 2, 2013.

The takedown of Silk Road is about much, much more than the allegations of billion-dollar drug dealing. It's about the power struggle between the forces of individualism and authority, writes Stilgherrian.

The FBI's takedown of notorious online marketplace Silk Road has been framed, from the moment of its announcement, as an important win in the war on illegal drugs. But that framing hides that fact that it's also a mere skirmish in another war that's been running far, far longer.

For as long as we've had politics - that is to say, for as long as we've gathered together in groups to organise ourselves into herds and packs and tribes and villages and nations, as opposed to streaming mindlessly through the oceans like shoals of mackerel - the structure of politics has been defined by two opposing forces. Evolutionary forces that are, in turn, defined by two competing aspects of human nature - both of which are essential to our survival, but which must be kept in a dynamic balance that matches the ever-changing environments we might face.

These aren't the two more familiar political forces of conservatism, the need to retain the structures and systems and processes of the past, versus the progressive drive for change and creating something different, though they come with that pair as a matched set. I'm talking about two conflicting forces that fight for where the balance of power lies between the freedom of the individual and control by central authority.

If a society allows too much freedom for the individual, or if the drive for change is too strong, then it will scatter into incoherence, and die. But if a society builds up too much central control, or there's too much of the inertia of conservatism, then it will fail to evolve, stagnate into irrelevance, and also die.

This fourfold structure of political forces was "explained", if that's not too strong a word, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, their 1975 sex-and-drug-filled science fiction satire, conspiracy theorists' playground, subversive training manual and postmodernist tour de force all in one. Yes, satire. But you can see the echoes of this political meta-structure in the fourfold structure of political analysis tools like the extraordinarily popular Vote Compass that the ABC ran during the recent federal election.

The bibliography of the New Hackers Dictionary, a book that purports to help readers "understand the hacker mindset" - in the old, non-disparaging sense of the word "hacker", as opposed its modern media usage as a synonym for online criminal - describes The Illuminatus! Trilogy as "the perfect right-brain companion to Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach".

Which brings us, in a round-about way, back to the internet revolution, and to Silk Road in particular.

The thing about the internet is that it's completely rewiring the way the human species handles information and knowledge for everyone on the planet. And because knowledge is power, that means we're really changing power relationships for everyone on the planet, at every level of society.

And I do mean every level.

Social media tools allow citizens to organise themselves into protests against their government, audiences to counter prominent media figures in campaigns like Destroy the Joint, and customers to complain about poor service from the businesses via the impromptu subversion of Twitter hashtag campaigns like #qantasluxury. Children have mobile communications devices in their pockets, allowing them to bypass parents and teachers. Criminals can identify undercover police officers trying to infiltrate their gangs by throwing their photos into Facebook.

All these are examples of how the internet can be a force for progressive individualism.

There's a thread of beliefs running through many parts of internet culture that's perhaps best called "cyberlibertarianism" - that the internet will enable us all, as free individuals, to communicate globally and form new, peer-to-peer relationships that can free us from the shackles of central governments.

But as British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis argued in his three-parter from 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - and as has in 2013 been made very clear by the continuing revelations about the scale and scope of global communications surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its "Five Eyes" allies such as the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and, presumably, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), formerly the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) - the internet could also represent the greatest enabler ever for the forces of centralised, authoritarian control.

Now I used the phrase "internet revolution" quite deliberately. It is a revolution, and the thing about revolutions is that, by definition, things change dramatically. Some things get broken. Some things get completely destroyed - including political structures and institutions. And to avoid being destroyed, they'll fight back.

In this framing, Silk Road represented a threat to centralism. It was a marketplace that thumbed its nose at authority and regulation by claiming to be anonymous and untraceable. So too the hard-to-trace digital cash Bitcoin that was used there, because it runs counter to the development of what financial institutions and governments would much prefer: a cashless but fully traceable economy.

The takedown of Silk Road is about much, much more than the allegations of billion-dollar drug dealing against San Francisco resident Ross Ulbricht, important as they are. It's about the power relationships, real and perceived, between the forces of individualism and powerful government organisations originally set up to prevent us being fried in a nuclear Armageddon.

From the point of view of the centrist forces, Silk Road and its like must not only be defeated, they must be crushed out of existence and deter anyone from attempting anything similar.*

How this all plays out over the coming decades is anyone's guess.

*Editor's note (October 7 2013): This sentence has been slightly amended to clarify who the author feels must defeat Silk Road and its like.

Stilgherrian is an opinionated and irreverent writer, broadcaster and consultant based in Sydney, Australia. View his full profile here.